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Double Bass Sight reading is HARD!

E

Ed S

Nov 14, 2019
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#1
Master of the obvious, huh? Just wanted to post this to express my respect for those of you who work hard at classical and play it at any relatively high level.

I'm a mediocre BG/oldtime thumper. I can read chord charts and pick up tunes quite quickly, and can toss in a few variations and ornamentations to make my basslines interesting and compliment the group sound.

My wife is a fiddler and prefers classical. We have a 4-piece ensemble that meets weekly, in which I hack up the cello parts. We are somewhere around the decent middle-school/mediocre high school level. A bottle of wine usually gets uncorked during the 2d-3d hour...

There are several local community orchestras of varying levels in our area. Last fall we tried the lowest one, but didn't continue with it for various reasons. Mainly, the violin parts were above my wife's ability, and the fiddlers were not as welcoming of another mediocre fiddler and the bassists were of me.

During the summer they hold a couple of sight-reading sessions, so we attended one this week, along with our ensemble's 2d fiddle. Franck's Symphony in D minor. Not a work I was familiar with. I looked up the music on-line and read it while listening through it once, but I never put bow to string.

Well, I think I played between 5-10% of the notes! :D Really threw me when it kept changing back and forth from 4/4 to cut time, and I'm not sure if there was a single key it didn't change to at least once! I kept getting lost during the extended rests, and had to listen to my section partners to know when to start back in again. Played it through twice - sure made more sense the second time!

And I found simply reading the music a challenge. I would have benefitted greatly from having my own paper copy that I marked up like crazy.

But I'm glad we did it. Straining the grey matter, staving off Alzheimer's and all. But the bottomline was to increase my appreciation of what you longhairs mae look so easy!

We'll see if we attend the next one in August...
 
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#3
I know where you’re coming from! I’ve been a jazz player most of my life and (having come to double bass in my late 40s via electric bass) I never learned the bow. So last year I started taking arco lessons from a wonderful local teacher, and a few months back she recommended I join the local community orchestra. While I think I’m an adequate reader, I knew nothing about classical music, had never played in a section or followed a conductor, and was generally pretty clueless. It’s not just the reading that’s hard - every piece we played this season has had passages that are just plain beyond my ability to play at tempo no matter how much I practice them. In jazz one can almost always find a way to play something simpler in order to maintain the groove, even when the tempos get up there - in classical, not so much! But the other players have been very welcoming and tolerant of my learning curve and it is really fun to be on stage and take part in producing that big symphonic sound! So I’m gonna stick with it, and trust that my playing will continue to improve. Nest of luck with your path, and have fun!
 
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#4
Sight reading (like most things involving the DB) is crazy hard! I spent years under microscopes working on micro electronics so now I’m further impeded by a stigmatism and can’t read to fast without my eyes stuttering around the page. Doubt I’ll ever be a super reader but I do believe it’s an absolute valuable skill to develop!
 
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#5
Yes, I'd like my membership card for the "mediocre sightreaders club."

I have a chamber-music camp coming up in a week. Fortunately, I have the sheet music for my group's piece - it's Carl Nielsen's "Serenata In Vano." I've been listening and shedding it during my daily practices, and I've marked bowings and fingerings on it, so it won't surprise me during the first rehearsal.

But I still have some problems.

One problem is counting and "feeling" rhythms, especially when they span measures with tied notes.
Another is, as @oren mentioned, is playing some things cleanly at tempo. There are some sixteenth-note runs that I simply won't be able to play (luckily, those runs double the cello, so I'll just let her play them!).

My appreciation for pianists has gone way up as a result of my sightreading inadequacies!
 
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#8
Dunno whether you're at all a fan of competitive cycling and the TDFrance that's about to wrap, but it's a great metaphor, given the interview content of a recent stage winner: it's almost too damn hard, but always never forget that almost all those around you are hurting as much as you, if not more! Those with an off-putting bad vibe are most likely vainly trying to compensate for their own feelings of terrific inadequacy.
Hang in there! Do the work, faithfully and steadily, and never give up, never surrender. :cool:
 
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#9
Bass is not my first instrument. I was a school band kid and started on the French horn (or simply "horn" for those of you in the know) and played it all the way through my music ed program in college. I actually got quite good at sight reading as a brass player.

String instruments are a whole different beast. Two things come to mind that present unique technical challenges for bowed strings:

1) The non-linear nature of where notes are on the instrument - I've found a big part of left hand technique development involves learning multiple ways of fingering a given pattern. Getting these patterns to a point of fluidity AND being able to intuit which one to use on the fly when sight reading, well, that's some high level thinking.

2) The bow. It's not as simple as taking a breath when you run out of air. Managing weight, speed, placement, etc. for a myriad of different rhythms and articulations is a ton of work. It gives purpose to bowing methods that emphasize building a repertoire of variations, i.e. Zimmerman, Sevcik, etc., as one never knows when they may need to use a given pattern. Again, though, learning to apply that stuff in real world situations is key, and it takes a lot of time and practice to continually expand one's repertoire of bowing patterns and apply them with relative ease.

I get why people go to conservatories to lock themselves away in practice rooms for hours a day, years on end. It takes a lot of work to get good at it! There's another facet to this though, which I think comprises taking the time to grind learning some orchestral rep and just try to get good at playing whatever is on the concert program. It's what I've had to do whenever a play with my community orchestra or a classical gig comes along as the music is often beyond my ability to sight read all of it. I usually end up being able to play most of what's on the page, but some the really tough stuff is still beyond my reach. Nice to have something to shoot for, though.
 
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#11
Good on you for trying, Ed S. I am aware that there is at least one English and one Australian book of graded sight reading exercises and will try to find and post their specific titles.

I have been playing orchestral music for just on 60 years and there is always some new music to challenge me. I see learning to play the bass grouped into five overlapping parts. There is right hand techniques and execution, left hand techniques and execution, closely putting the two hands together for articulation and timing. Then there is mapping the fingerboard and reading the music. All these are happening at once while a student and the Simandl Tutor (or similar) does not help learning to read much IMO. This is why most Forum people here advocate having a good teacher to make sense of the process and help you put it all together.

Reading music is just reading a different language. It has its own terminology and symbols to recognise and learn. Your brain can work at extraordinary speed, much faster than is needed to read music. I think that you can allocate a part of your practice just to developing reading and make quick progress. For a start if you can speak and read aloud from a book you are already on the way. You will note that your eyes constantly move forward ahead of your mouth. They see the words and send signals to the brain which then has to recognise them and instruct everything to produce the string of sounds like squeezing toothpaste from a tube. This can be more complex when reading music because there is usually a vertical component (note and other symbol recognition) as well as a horizontal one (rythm, timing and division of the beats with different lengths of notes).

Sight reading is not to be frightened of by your age. It is a learnt process, starting slowly and methodically with easy music (Simandl level) and being note-sure and finger-sure at each level. The eyes have to stay ahead of the notes played to give the brain time to work. If the eyes stop then the brain runs out of messages and you stop. The challenge becomes finding graded music to keep challenging you. Orchestral parts help if you can be note-sure and finger sure at the fastest speed that you can read at that moment. It is finally interdependent with knowing the fingerboard and fingering possibilities but start the learning process with simple and easy single lines of music in easy keys.
 
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#13
David - thanks for the thoughtful response.

My wife and daughter have studied some music pedagogy, and often compare reading language vs music. One thing I like most about music is the way I can almost see my brain in the act of learning.

You are very right as to the challenge of finding appropriately graded music which is challenging, yet accessible. We experience that all the time in our classical ensemble. We play for our own enjoyment, and are probably at the level of a very good middle school or a not incredible high school. Fortunately, our 2d fiddle is a HS orch director, so he is familiar w/ a great deal of literature.

Just recently I noted that over the past couple of years I have obviously gotten better at sight reading. Just simple things - if I realize I'm not certain as to the key for a piece/passage, I can glance back to the key sig and find my place again. Which I previously COULD NOT do! :D And - GASP - I can also occasionally take the briefest glances to look at my playing partners!

This community orchestra intentionally chooses challenging pieces for these sight reading exercises. For their season, their repertoire is much more accessible. I assume when I retire one of these years I'll start playing with them more regularly. It is kinda exciting to encounter something like that, that I know I can't do now, but with a bit of work, I could at least get better. Of course, add that to the evergrowing list of things I ought to work on... ;)
 
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#14
My sight reading is OK. I don't see it as an exercise, but as a by-product of playing from written music.
The more you play and practice studies, orchestral pieces etc, the better your sight reading will get.
If you don't use much written music and play by ear most of the time, it will take longer to master.
If this is the case, you don't need this skill as much.
Good sight reading skills come with hours of practicing from music scores.
I dont play by ear, and am absolutely useless at generating a heard sound on my bass!
 
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#16
CaseyVancouver said:
This article from cellist Robert Battey may be useful to you.
Part 3 especially.
His teacher was Janos Starker who told him to have an internal muscle that keeps the pulse (time).

A New Look at Sight-Reading (Part 3) — by Robert Battey
Click to expand...
I haven't been around this forum for a few years, and just "re-upped."... and this is one of the first threads I read, and I'm really glad it's here. While pursuing my undergraduate degree in music education w/ concentration on violin, Bob was our string quartet coach and the new cello prof at school. We spent a lot of time together back in the late 70's/early 80's, and he was a tremendous musician and good friend. I haven't seen or heard from him since, and would LOVE to get back in touch with him. We had a lot of good times together. In addition to our shared love of string literature, particularly the small ensemble and solo works (he introduced me to the Ysaye violin sonati... wow... still some of my favorite challenging pieces to play), I was also a jazz/fusion pianist and I can remember introducing him to Chick Corea's Return to Forever's "Romantic Warrior" album. Durin some of Al DiMeola's soli, I can still see him lowering his head, shaking it back and forth with his eyes closed, saying over and over, "who ISSS this guy!?!?!!!!!"

I skimmed the article of his to which you linked, and it's excellent; I want to go back and read it in depth. THe one thing I'd say about sight reading is that, really, sight reading when done correctly is STILL playing by ear. When you get increasingly proficient, those notes on the page stop being single notes, and become grouped into sounds. You hear those sounds in your head, then play them. It takes a while to get to that level of proficiency, but that's really what it boils down to. I always drilled that into all of my students.

Take this word...."L A U G H T E R." None of you saw an L, then an A, then a U, etc. Heck, a lot of folks probably just smiled inwardly immediately due to the effect of seeing a familiar sight that evoked a feeling. Notes do the same things letters do in English (or any other language); they combine to form bigger ideas. Only difference is that notes, articulations, and dynamics combine to form pitches and rhythms rather than words and literal meanings.

The more fluent you get, the more you start to see sounds, rather than techniques and individual actions, and then your ear guides your hands to produce what you are already hearing. Music is about playing what you're already listening to internally, rather than moving your eyes and hands, then listening to the result and hoping it's right.

Bob's point about always keeping the pulse when you're sight-reading is dead on. View the music as a conveyor belt going by that you are NOT allowed to slow down or stop once you've decided on the speed you've set it at. Grab as much of the music as you can as it goes by. If you miss too much, or are getting frustrated, practice sight reading slightly less difficult stuff or slow down the tempo at which you are attempting the excerpt until your success-to-frustration ration is acceptable to you. Also, do this without your instrument at all; just set a metronome, follow the music, and get your inner ear to actually hear it internally before picking up your axe.

Just some thoughts! Good to be back. If anyone has any contact info for Bob, or knows where he is now (that article was from 2012, sadly), PLEASE send me a PM and let me know. Tell him Manilow wants to get in touch with him!
 
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